"The problems with turnitin.com"1
Turnitin gives school districts an automated tool to search for instances of plagiarism.2 I haven't used it before (and I have no idea how useful/useless it may be).3 The Washington Post ran a story4 which re-ignited my interest in it.5 I wish the students all the best for their attempt to mobilize these activities on the net.6 Their intentions are noble and I think their passion is commendable.7
The problem with “turnitin.com” is that a student should be the only person who decides who uses or reads their documents.8 If your concerned that9 "Turnitin is making money by stealing my intellectual property",10 now, don't you fret, now, don't you frown11. Right there it tells you how to turn the ****ing thing off.12 Which will work unless13 you forget to add it to the robots.txt, or the bot is drunk and ignores the robots.txt.14
Plagiarism has never been easier than it is today.15 "According to Turnitin only 1 out of 200 in my 2nd year physics was not guilty of plagiarism"16, says one student. But, does it really surprise you? I mean really? It shouldn't.17
1 MikeSmith.com2 Ars Technica
3 Andrew Martin
4 Slashdot.com
5 thefourthrail.com
6 Dr. Baljeet S Kapoor
7 The Cavalier Daily
8 TurnItIn.com
9 Mariana Restoration
10 Sacremento State Memo
11 Kristin C. Hall
12 Slashdot.com
13 TMG Utiltity
14 WebMaster World
15 Plagiarism.org
16 Digg.com
17 WorldNetDaily
Apr 12, 2007
8:21 pm
That is way harder than it looks. I've wanted to do something like this on an actual school essay for a long time. We now know it would literally take forever.
Apr 13, 2007
10:29 am
(every sentence was copied from the sources listed, get it? I didn't 'write' anything.)
Apr 26, 2007
11:39 am
Now the real trick would be create an AI bot that does the same thing, automatically with any given story. Now that would be a feat!Then it could list the sources at the bottom as you have done. The impressive part is if it picked up on relevant sentences and created coherent paragraphs from the various sources.
Jul 12, 2007
5:14 pm
That would be very cool Robert. Imagine... you write a synopsis of an essay and the application plagiarizes an entire paper for you (properly sourced ofcourse :) ). I'm afraid of the linguistic restraints that it would require, otherwise it almost has enough appeal to warrant a prototype. Never in history have we had a larger data set so readily available and so accurately searchable (GOOG).